Members of the families with deaf and blind children and families with a parent suffering from neurosis are similar in their “life conditions” – they have to adapt their life to some limitations, caused by the disease or disability of a family member. In both cases disorder provokes changes in family system, mobilizing all the family resources to fight the disease. One of the aims was to compare destructive effect of child’s or parent’s disorder on the family system.
Participants were 100 families with teenagers (269 people). In 25 families mothers suffered from neurosis, 16 families with deaf and 15 – with blind teenagers, 44 families with no disorders.
Using 6961 event sampling, we examined their stress and coping experiences (Perrez, Schoebi, Wilhelm, 2000). Family members were instructed to daily report everyday stressful events, emotions, causal attribution, coping and coping outcomes.
In families with a patient we found specifics in the types of stressors, emotions, causal attributions and coping. They had higher scores on conflicts, the main source of criticism and negative evaluation more often were family members. Predictors of inadequate mother’s coping were her social family stress and non-social family stress, her frustration and anger, inadequate child’s coping and father’s intervention into stressful situation.
Comparative analysis of the level of adequate and inadequate coping within family system showed that in control group there were more families with triadic adequate coping (when all three families members used adequate coping in the stressful situation).
In families with a patient or a teenager with disability specifics of father’s causal attributions was in ignorance that neurotic wife or a child with disability can be a source or subject able to control stressor or solve the problem.
Among mothers most “unsuccessful” in problem solving were mothers, suffering from neurosis.